Abstract

Much as a terrain acquires the significance of being an environment with opportunities for and hazards to survival with the emergence of animals through the processes of biological evolution, so an environment acquires the significance of being (a part of) the world, the locus of truth, with the emergence of rational animals through processes of social and cultural evolution. This chapter provides an account of essential features of these processes and of the nature and role of natural language in them. With the acquisition of language and culture, it is argued, one is provided a view of things, the eyes to see things as they are. From having a merely animal form of life, one becomes a rational animal, a fundamentally different sort of being answerable to the norm of truth.